Infectious diseases and the increasing threat of worldwide pandemics have underscored the importance of antibiotics and hygiene. Microbial infection is of a grave concern for various commercial applications such as medical devices, hospital surfaces, textiles, food packaging, children's toys, electrical appliances, as well as dental equipment. In the US, hospital-acquired infections affect 2 million people annually, resulting in 90,000 deaths. Additionally, biomaterial-centered infections are common, accounting for 45% of all nosocomial infections, even with prior sterilization and implementation of high levels of disinfection. Common hygiene or sterilization procedures do help to limit the infection; however, the results rely highly on the strength of biocides or techniques. The harsh sterilization techniques commonly used such as irradiation or ethylene oxide/bleach treatment may alter the property of the material essential for the device's performance and are not suitable for most of the applications. The development of a new sterilization method that is mild while ultra-efficient and can selectively kill broad spectrum of micro-organisms instantly is thus of high demand.
Antimicrobial peptides (AMP) have attracted tremendous attention as an alternative to traditional antibiotics. AMPs exhibit a selective membrane-disruptive activity, demonstrating a fast killing mechanism and the potential to deal with drug-resistance issues usually associated with conventional antibiotics. However, the high cost of manufacture and poor half-lives of AMPs in vivo has also limited its applications in healthcare and hygiene.
In addition, while most antimicrobial materials can assume amphiphilic structures, self-gelation of such amphiphilic structures is often not realized. There have been reports of antimicrobial materials that can assemble to hydrogels including peptides and block polymers based on chitin and lactic acid materials. However, these assembly processes are typically triggered by co-gelation polymers or by grafting the antimicrobial material with other polymers.
There is therefore a need to provide a compound that overcomes, or at least ameliorates, one or more of the disadvantages of the effects as described above. There is also a need to provide a pharmaceutical composition comprising the compound, a gel comprising the compound, the use of the compound, pharmaceutical composition or gel as an antibiotic or to kill or inhibit the growth of a microorganism, and a method for synthesizing the gel